A 50-year-old study recently rediscovered by researchers at the University of San Francisco gives an entirely new meaning to the phrase “sugar daddy.”
Back in the 1960s, the sugar lobby — specifically, a group called the Sugar Research Foundation — paid off three Harvard professors in the equivalent of $50,000 in today’s money to publish falsified research that would reject the notion that high amounts of sugar consumption lead to heart disease and other health issues.
According to the authors of the 1967 study, sugar was by no means the health culprit. Instead, they claimed that “the only dietary intervention required to prevent coronary heart disease was to reduce dietary cholesterol and substitute polyunsaturated fat for saturated fat in the American diet.”
As modern research has shown us, this is not necessarily the case.
Today, scientists acknowledge that some fats can actually be good for you. In fact, healthy amounts of unsaturated fat — like the kinds found in fatty fish and walnuts — can actually decrease your risk of heart disease.
We now know that there’s a fairly certain link between sugar consumption and obesity, heart disease and other health problems. Our society is becoming more and more cognizant of that fact, but sugar still finds its way into almost every processed food out there.
While the 1967 study may seem irrelevant today, it really is important. That study helped shape the perception millions of people had — and continue to have — about what constitutes a healthy diet.
I think the takeaway from these revelations, though, is that we must always face the information we encounter with a healthy amount of skepticism.
It’s fairly easy to be suspicious about a claim that a politician makes, because we know that politicians by their very nature have an agenda. They have a list of policies and initiatives they want to implement, and one reason for that is the outside interests influencing them with money.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve always regarded science — and, by extension, research — with a kind of reverence.
Science, ideally, is governed entirely by fact, logic and data, and there’s beauty in that. A sanctity, even.
You might even say that the word “science” holds connotations of truth and credibility. We can find comfort in aligning with a belief that has science backing it up.
Like, for example, the notion that, yes, a large Coke, a steak with a generous helping of barbecue sauce and a big slice of chocolate cake sounds like a nutritionally sound meal.
As it turns out, maybe we can find ignorance and complacency in said belief, too.
Again, the impact of the sugar lobby on health research isn’t just a thing of the past. It’s a thing of the present, too. In 2015, the New York Times published an article showing that Coca-Cola funneled millions of dollars into funding “research” to “prove” that obesity is a result of a lack of exercise and diet has little to do with it.
The upshot is this: we need to continually question, challenge and test our most deeply held beliefs and ideas — even the ones to which we’ve strongly adhered for generations. We might just discover that they’ve been sugar-coated all along.
